How Shimbiri actually works on a boat.
Built by sailors who code. Not coders who sail. Every line tested on the ocean, built and proven on a real boat, across a real season. The adaptive layer keeps learning from how she’s run.
The system thinks like a small, capable crew.
Each crew member owns a domain. The Captain orchestrates between them. You ask one question; whichever crew members are needed answer together, and you see one synthesised reply, not a wall of dashboards.
Navigator, weatherman, and pilot in one watch. It gives the AI the same sources the best tools run on, so its read is about your boat, here, now. It works alongside your plotter today, and over time it can do more of that job. Reads the GRIB, plans the route, refuses to brief when the forecast is stale, talks you in over the bar at landfall, writes the Ship’s Log every hour. The same voice that won PHS Division 1 in the 80th Sydney–Hobart.
Racing up the Derwent, it fused Purser, PredictWind and Claude into the call to tack, and the data to convince the crew.
Bosun and quartermaster. Knows what’s due, what’s on board, what’s running out. Files the evidence when a job is done. Spots a pattern when impellers fail every 500 hours instead of the manual’s 800. Builds the Cat 1 audit pack so the surveyor finds the boat ready.
Guided Shimbiri through the Category 1 certifications, audit-ready for the Sydney–Hobart.
Watches every NMEA system continuously: battery, fuel, water, engine, generator, solar. Sends you a vessel briefing on WhatsApp every morning. Diagnoses an alarm instead of just reporting one.
Found a hidden CAN-bus fault in the autopilot from stored data, saved thousands. 427,000+ readings across 344 systems.
Every manual on the boat: OCR’d, indexed, citable. Ask about a fault code, get the manufacturer’s procedure with the page reference. Every answer traces back to a page you can open and verify.
A skipper photographed a flood and was walked through the fix. 359 manuals indexed; the right page cited.
Who’s on board, what they’re qualified for, and when each cert expires. Watch handovers in two minutes, no more spreadsheet trying to keep track.
Every crew ticket and expiry, tracked to the day.
Routes whatever you ask to whichever crew member can answer. Asks the Purser for the manual spec, the Chief Engineer for the live reading, and gives you one answer with both. The conductor.
Ties the whole crew together into one watch.
The kind of questions the crew answers: Cat 1, survey, SMS, a fault at 2am? See the answers →
“The win was the people. Tristan Hamilton, our Sailing Master, was central to it, and the crew system dropped him: it didn’t carry people or their certifications across, and his role was left off the first cut, so ‘Sailing Master’ never made the official merchandise. I had to call and escalate to a manager before he was put back. A man essential to the result nearly went unmentioned, because the admin failed him, not the other way round. Boats are won by people. The tech should carry them, not lose them.”
Ben Shipley · Founder
No rip-and-replace. Plugs into what’s already there.
The platform speaks the protocols your boat already speaks. The hardware tier is one install, not a refit.
Every sound, warning, and data stream tells a story.